[food] caramelised onion & butternut squash tart

[kaberett]

Lightly adapted from Food52 (mostly, to my surprise and alarm, involving halving the quantity of cheese...)

This takes quite a while, but it does us eight servings (so four days' worth of dinners) accompanied by potatoes with some combination of peas, beans, carrots, and salad. Vegetables can be prepared while the assembled tart is baking.

Ingredients

[a pie case: I do my default shortcrust or the original recipe includes a suggestion]
½ butternut squash, in ~2cm cubes*
3-4 medium red onions, sliced
2 eggs
300ml crème fraîche
2 oz cheddar, grated** [~55g]
1 oz fake Parmesan***, grated [~25g]
4 sprigs thyme
misc: salt, pepper, butter, oil, balsamic vinegar

Method

1. Set oven heating to 160°C fan/180°C
   
2. Melt a knob of butter in a frying pan. Turn the heat all the way down. Add the sliced onions, leaves of 2 thyme sprigs, a pinch of salt, and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Cook for as long as you can be bothered, stirring occasionally and ideally covered.****
   
3. Select a baking sheet or dish. Add squash and oil. Stir to combine, and spread out to ideally a single layer. Stick in the oven for ~40 minutes, stirring halfway through.
   
4. If your quiche case is not yet baked, turn the oven up to 200°C once the squash is done and bake the pastry blind. This will take 15-20 minutes. (Keep stirring the onions periodically.)
   
5. Combine crème fraîche, eggs, cheeses, black pepper, and the leaves from the other two sprigs of time.
   
6. Assemble: add onions, then squash, then cheese mixture.
   
7. Reduce oven temperature to ~160°C again. Return the flan to the oven for 30-40 minutes.
   

* This is also a reduction from the original recipe, which specifies "1 large butternut squash". I don't know if this is a disagreement about how much butternut squash constitutes "one large", or me using a smaller quiche tin (though I don't think that's the case), or what, but I'm pretty sure if I used a whole squash it would wind up overflowing. The other half of the squash gets used for warm couscous salad, or curry, or...

** A is not keen on gruyère, at least in this context; I'd be very happily using a goat cheddar, but he's also suspicious of goats.

*** In the EU (sob), Parmesan (DOP!) is by definition not vegetarian. Happily, supermarkets increasingly sell "vegetarian Italian hard cheese", which is very considerate of them.

**** Alternatively, decide you cannot be having with this and just chuck the onions into the same roasting pan as the squash.

Comments

[shanaqui]

(mostly, to my surprise and alarm, involving halving the quantity of cheese...)

...Why would you ever halve the amount of cheese?! (Says the person with no gallbladder, who really should halve the amount of cheese in everything, and will learn that maybe when they are dead.)

[kaberett]

because it consistently wound up unpleasantly greasy! WE ARE BAFFLED TOO

[momijizukamori]

This is like, a giant pile of things I love (squash, cheese, onions, pie) so I will have to try it out :O

[jesse_the_k]

Mmmmmmmmm.

[rugessnome]

so uh (ae say from the wild wild cheese [mid]west of the US of A, where labeling laws are ... more lax, and domestic "parmesan" in green canisters mixed with cellulose is common) "fake" parmesan here = ...non DOP dairy based cheese made with plant rennet?

(for some reason my brain automatically goes to vegan substitutes when I hear "fake [cheese]", unless maybe a prop/decoration would make more sense in the context. And I kinda wondered when you mentioned this the other day why you'd bother to go for vegan cheese for only one of the cheeses. 🧀)

[kaberett]

Yes! Precisely! DOP means that anything sold as "Parmesan" over here has (... or had, until recently, or SOMETHING...) to be made using animal rennet. (No, migraine-fingers, not "animal reddit".) Vegetarian rennet --> "vegetarian Italian hard cheese" :)